


chew dust, go back for seconds

by ghost_teeth



Category: 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
Genre: Ghosts, M/M, lazy geography
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-24
Updated: 2017-04-24
Packaged: 2018-10-23 06:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10714185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_teeth/pseuds/ghost_teeth
Summary: Ben wakes to a colorless dawn, and there’s a man sitting in the chair by the window and it’s Dan, of course it is.





	chew dust, go back for seconds

Ben waits until Contention is a dreamy blur in the distance before he makes good his escape from the prison car. He makes a point of watching the train go by from horseback, in full view of the tracks for anyone who might care to see and object. No one does. When all that remains of the 3:10 is a tail of unsettled dust, he turns his horse south.

Some miles out, he remembers distantly that he failed to collect his effects from the jailer in his haste to escape the train car. The only things left to him now are his sketchbook and a boot knife plucked from one of the dead lawmen in Contention. His belt, his fine black hat, the Hand of God—all are still in the doughy hands of the guard. He wonders why they never even crossed his mind until just now. A man without a gun out here is a dead man. But mostly he finds himself feeling the loss of them like he’s lost his own face. There will be no recovering them now, though. He rides on.

He gives Contention a wide berth as he passes back that way. Could still be lawmen sniffing for scraps. Could still be other things he doesn’t care to see again.

Two days later, he liberates a beautiful silver watch from a careless traveler in Tombstone, slipping it deftly from the man’s waistcoat like the kind of cheap pickpocket he hasn’t been in over thirty years. The theft sits sour with his pride, but he hawks the watch for twenty dollars anyway.

He purchases a new gun (wrong weight, too light maybe), a new hat (pale, wide-brimmed, poorly suited to his face—another man’s hat).

He rents a room and sits at the hotel bar late into the night, twirling a whiskey glass between his fingers and avoiding eyes. The hotel is new and chintzy and houses a sizeable population of young honeymooners, and the bar is a riot of mirrors and tinsel. He shouldn’t be anywhere near a flash establishment like this, not two days after jumping a prison train. But with this strange new hat and gun, he feels invisible, invulnerable. It’s a little thrilling.

Four whiskeys deep, he produces his sketchbook and the stub of a pencil from the inner pocket of his coat.

The book is half empty, most of its pages torn out as each drawing was completed. Ben isn’t in the habit of keeping his sketches. He tends to leave them in the place they were drawn, maybe because he likes the idea of showing that there were eyes here once, in this place, witnessing. Or maybe he just leaves them because they’re rough, unlovely things and he doesn’t take any special pride in them.

He thumbs to an empty page and stares at it, running a finger over the soft, worn corner of the book. He tries to call to mind trees, growing things, birds. All he comes up with is eyes, glassy and wide, green maybe, the sick-to-death color of the sky before a twister. He draws his own left hand dancing around the rim of the whiskey glass instead. He tears the drawing out, folds it up, leaves it on the table with twenty cents for his drinks.

 

_________________

 

(That night, he dreams yellow seashore and white sky. He’s crouched in the surf, trying to build a man’s shape from hard, wet sand. Every time he tries to build the face, the tide washes it out and he’s obliged to start again. The gulls sob overhead like men begging for some kind of absolution. Someone’s hand grips his shoulder, and he’s not allowed to turn and see who it might be.)

_________________

 

Ben wakes to a colorless dawn, and there’s a man sitting in the chair by the window and it’s Dan, of course it is.

Dan is all ground-in grit and road dust, just the same as he was the last time Ben saw him, coming up on four days ago. But there’s no rifle across his knees now, and he isn’t clutching a watch like a rosary. His pale, battered hat is in his hands and he’s fingering a fray in the brim, watching Ben with a lazy sort of patience.

Ben can’t come up with anything smarter to say than Dan’s name, so he says it, hoarsely.

Dan smiles, in the only way Ben has ever seen him do—a crooked, unhappy flash of yellow teeth, gone before Ben can commit it to memory—and leans forward, elbows on his knees. There’s no tension in the lines of his body, not even any kind of anticipation. He just watches quietly, fussing with his hat. They stare at one another for a long time, Ben waiting for this vision of Dan to make some move, Dan apparently content to wait for nothing in particular.

Finally, Ben says, too loudly in the silence of the room, “Well, Dan, I’ll be heading out of here just as soon as I can. You’re welcome to sit there until Judgment Day, if you like.” He gets out of bed and puts his clothes in order with unsteady hands, too aware of Dan’s eyes on him all the while. Dan watches seemingly without interest, and Ben watches back as he fumbles his feet into his boots.

When Ben moves to leave the room, Dan is standing at the door. Ben doesn’t see him unfold himself from the chair and move toward the door—he’s just _there_ , within a breath. Ben leads him out the door, down the stairs, and outside.

When he crosses the threshold of the hotel, Ben can’t help but look back for Dan. He is unsurprised to find himself alone.

 

_________________

 

He leaves Tombstone far behind within the day and presses south, stopping to sleep for the night only when the town is completely out of sight. Dan rejoins him in the evening, appearing between breaths on the other side of the meager campfire.

Ben chews a strip of ancient bacon and watches him, reclining on one elbow. He wipes gritty bacon grease on his pants and fishes his sketchbook and pencil out of his coat. Dan appears to almost lean into the firelight, as if trying to give Ben better lighting for his drawing.

The drawing takes longer than most of Ben’s previous portraits ever have—he takes unusual pains with the play of shadow and firelight on Dan’s ragged face. He renders the hard, wounded lines of the rancher’s mouth and the deep set of his eyes with particular care. When the portrait is something approaching good enough, Ben closes the book and puts it back in his coat pocket. He does not tear the drawing out.

Dan stays utterly still even after the drawing is finished, but Ben lays down, pillowing his head on the crook of his arm. He watches Dan until he can’t keep his eyes open any longer.

 

_________________ 

For days, Ben continues toward Mexico, and Dan is often at his side.

Although this Dan never says a word, he sits obligingly for portraits, as many as a half-dozen a day, wearing that expression of distant unease, the one that Ben remembers from those hours in the bridal suite. Ben can even instruct him, to some degree—turn your shoulders, move your hand just so. Ben draws Dan in many bleak and beautiful places. He learns something new about the angles of Dan’s face every day. He does not wonder if the living Dan might have learned to sit for him like this, given time and different circumstances.

There’s something soft about this Dan, something indistinct and unsettled about the lines of him. When Ben talks to him, he can’t help but speak quietly, for fear of disturbing some kind of tenuous assembly of particles and banishing him back into the dust. Dan seems at least to listen when Ben speaks. Sometimes he almost nods, or shifts his shoulders in a way that looks like a shrug. But he never replies. And he never smiles again.

“Turn your face that way, Dan,” Ben says one evening, pointing vaguely in the direction of the setting sun. “Want to get that nice orange sunset on you.” He’s lounging on a warm rock shelf like a basking lizard, feeling something close to pleasant.

Dan complies, without enthusiasm or hesitation.

“Mm, no, more like…” Ben slides off his perch, crunches across the gravel to where Dan leans against a rocky outcropping, arms crossed. Ben reaches up and grips Dan’s chin gently (unnecessarily) to adjust his pose. As he turns Dan’s face to where he wants it, he tries not to notice the tremble in his own fingers. His touch lingers on Dan’s face a bit too long, maybe, but Dan just looks at him mildly, unconcerned.

As he retreats back to his rock, Ben tries to remember the feel of the flesh, or the stubble on Dan’s chin. Surely he must have felt it, but he can’t find the memory of it, and there’s no lingering warmth on the pads of his fingers.

 

_________________

 

(Once, Ben dreams blue desert and black sky and Charlie. Charlie says, boss—boss—boss—boss—boss and there is a whole pack of Charlies going boss—boss—boss—boss and there’s ten of him and there’s twenty of him and they’re coyotes and they’re circling just outside the firelight and there’s Dan and he opens his mouth and swallows all those howls and everything is so quiet Ben can’t hear himself breathe.)

 

_________________

 

One night, as they face one another from opposite ends of the fire, Ben says, “You’re an interesting man to watch, Dan Evans. You’re the sort of man who has ten crises a minute, right inside your head, and you’re real bad at keeping it from your face. Wish I’d drawn twenty pictures of you in Contention. Each one would’ve said something different.” He’s pulling heavily from a flask of whiskey purchased in Tombstone, flipping through his sketchbook, frowning. “I wonder if maybe that’s what made your wife stop loving you, Dan. If maybe she got tired of you living in your head and never even bothering to send her a postcard.”

Ben examines Dan from across the fire. The sketches are all wrong, he’s realizing. Sure, he’s captured every possible view of him, but there is nothing of the quiet storm that used to haunt the hollows of Dan’s face, the still-hungry light in his eyes, too bright in such a weary face.

“You know,” he says, “you’da taken a swing at me for that, before. Probably threatened to shoot me. That was an ugly thing to say.”

Dan watches him impassively, leaning forward with his arms looped around his knees, and doesn’t reply. Ben feels something in him seize, and he takes a deep drink of whiskey. Dan is like a marionette with an unmotivated puppeteer. It’s unreal and, Ben finds himself thinking suddenly, infuriating. Over the course of these last few days, he’s said at least fifty things that would have made Dan spitting mad before. It was one of his most captivating qualities—watching Dan snap suddenly from stolid despair to rage was an endless source of fascination for Ben in the few days they spent together.

Sucking the taste of the whiskey from his teeth, Ben slaps the dirt next to him. “Come here, Dan,” he says. “Come over here. No need to sit so far away.” He can feel himself grinning madly.

Dan doesn’t move. But he also doesn’t object when Ben springs to his feet and stumbles around the fire to plant himself in Dan’s space. “What’s wrong, Dan?” Ben croons, pushing his face so close to Dan’s that their noses are almost touching. “Nothin’ holy to say these days? I shot all my boys for you, Dan. I got on that train. Lost the nicest hat I ever had for you, Dan. Seems to me, least you could do is be a little more convincing.”

Still, there’s no reaction from Dan. He just sits there, loose-limbed and impassive.

Ben feels something sick and hot rush through his veins. He reaches out and seizes the dead man by his lapels, throwing him off balance so he has to catch himself with one hand on the ground. His eyes widen just a bit, and the sight of it is horribly satisfying to Ben. The cloth crushed in Ben’s fists is solid and _real_ , it must be.

“Well, as far as haunts go, Dan, you ain’t all that interesting. Why couldn’t it have been Charlie? He’d at least be an _interesting_ haunt, I can guarantee you that,” Ben snarls into Dan’s face. “You’re making me regret what I let you make me do, Dan, if this is all you ever were.”

Dan hangs slack in Ben’s grasp, meeting his eyes levelly. The color isn’t even right, Ben thinks. The tired gray is there, but it’s missing the flash of violent ocean-green that came with Dan’s occasional flare of temper, the color Ben liked best.

He gives Dan a short, hard shake. “Come on, Dan. You can push me. Push me back, Dan. Hit me. Your wife hates how you stranded her in the desert and left her. You’re a failure of a father and a rancher. You dyin’ meant absolutely nothing to nobody.”

With that last, Ben seizes Dan by the back of his neck and digs his nails in, staring hungrily into that expressionless face. Dan doesn’t even wince at the dirty fingernails seeking the tender places between his vertebrae. His skin, Ben realizes, is the exact temperature of the air around them.

And then he’s yanking Dan forward and crushing their mouths together, maybe seeking heat, cold, something human. It’s biting more than kissing. Dan’s hands come up to his chest, pressing, but not pushing. Ben pushes harder, sending the both of them to the ground. He pins Dan beneath him, bites the tepid flesh of Dan’s mouth to the point where anyone else’s would bleed. He fists his hand in Dan’s hair and pulls savagely, hoping for blood, praying it might make him say something, push him away, scream, anything.

It might have gone something like this, Ben finds himself thinking remotely. If such an opportunity had ever presented itself, it would’ve been teeth and blood and dirt and it would’ve been feral and unkind, more like bear-baiting than anything. There was some kind of edge he was always trying to force Dan over, and maybe this would’ve been it.

But he’s the only one pushing now, he knows. There’s no fight coming from Dan, sprawled in the dirt beneath him. He’s not even trying to turn his face away. He’s just taking, placid and pliable.

Dan tastes of nothing at all, not even salt.

Ben rears back to sit on his heels, cold nausea gnawing his stomach. He looks down at Dan, who looks back, unruffled and unbloodied and no more or less filthy than he has ever been. Ben is reminded suddenly of that night on the road when he’d made his first escape, when Dan had thrown the handcuff key into the night and stared up at him from the dust, seething but utterly unafraid. There’s none of that beautiful defiance in Dan now.

As he looks at this hollow thing wearing Dan Evans’s face, Ben wonders what kind of devil would send such an obscene phantom to him.

 

_________________

 

After that, Ben can’t bring himself to draw any more pictures of Dan. But Dan doesn’t go away. He’s there in the evenings, sitting at the campfire. He’s there in the gray dawn. He’s there whenever Ben stops riding.

Ben can’t help but talk at him, endlessly. He talks right through all the quiet moments, never bothering to stop for the replies that he knows are never coming. The silences are too loud and they tug at him in unfamiliar and disagreeable ways.

“Cold tonight.”

“You realize once I collect a new outfit you’re gonna be a lot easier to ignore.”

“What if I find myself some friendly company, Dan? What’re you gonna do, just sit there like that and watch?”

“You ever see the seashore, Dan? I seen it a handful of times. You wouldn’t believe the colors you can see there.”

“You know, Dan, seems to me you should be doing your haunting in Contention. Maybe go back to Bisbee, give Hollander a scare. All your chain-rattlin’s wasted on me.”

Sometimes, he thinks about reaching for Dan again. He thinks about how far Dan might let him take it, what he might let Ben do to him. Ben’s fingers all but itch with the need as they stare at one another from across evening campfires. But when he remembers the non-feeling of it, how it didn’t even leave an aftertaste, the urge is easy to suppress.

Sometimes, in slightly mad moments, he wonders if maybe this Dan is just the best his mind can conjure. Maybe there was no actual reason for shooting his gang, getting on the train. He thought he’d come to know the complete measure of this man in their short acquaintance, maybe better than most other living souls knew him. But maybe he’d just created a noble excuse out of the closest sob story.

Sometimes, in truly mad moments, he wonders if he’s stolen Dan’s ghost from where it ought to be. He wonders if maybe he’s taken too much ownership of this man—really a stranger—and is bearing what’s left of him far from his family and his home unjustly.

He finds he likes this idea.

 

_________________

 

In a little silver mining town just north of the border, Ben stretches out in the first bed he’s had since Tombstone. The hotel room is stifling, really just a windowless closet with a cot wedged inside, but Ben luxuriates in the feel of something other than rocks under his back.

Dan is there, too, of course. He’s sitting on the edge of the bed.

It’s too early to sleep, too hot. But it’s too late to do much else. Ben just stares at the ceiling, eyes listlessly following a crack in the plaster. He is too aware of the divot in the bed where Dan sits by his ankles. The thought that Dan has _weight_ pleases him.

Ben sits up and turns to look at Dan. Dan glances at him, looking almost distracted. On impulse, Ben reaches over and takes him by the shoulders. Dan goes obediently as Ben guides him down to stretch out on the bed alongside him. Ben folds his hands on his chest and they lay there like that, the two of them, side by side on the meager bed like casualties awaiting burial.

No heat radiates from Dan’s body. But Ben greedily soaks in the weight of him on the mattress, the pressure against his arm.

Ben says, “Dan, I think I’ve managed to steal all the parts of you I never much liked.” His voice sounds thin and weary to his own ears.

And then, remotely, as if from another room, Dan says, “It’s probably about time somebody denied you something.”

Ben hears himself laughing. Nothing is funny. Dan is laughing too, far away.

Ben has never heard Dan laugh before, not truly. He thinks he would have remembered the sound.

 

_________________

 

Ben crosses into Mexico, and Dan doesn’t follow. Ben sees him once more just past the border, watching at a distance with the same satisfied slump to his shoulders as that very last moment in Contention. Ben paws his coat pocket frantically for his sketchbook and charcoal.

Just as he manages to find them, Dan turns north, and is gone as fast as blinking.

**Author's Note:**

> commiserate with me at everyoneissquidwardinpurgatory.tumblr.com if the main characters die at the ends of all your favorite movies


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